Class action lawyers, take note: “Resident” is not the same thing as “citizen.” And trying to use the words interchangeably to avoid federal jurisdiction won’t get by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Ruling 2-1 Thursday, the panel found that amending a complaint in an antitrust class action against Visa Inc. to replace “resident” with “citizen” after the case was removed to federal court was not enough to avoid federal jurisdiction under an exception of the U.S. Class Action Fairness Act. In so holding, the panel reversed a lower court’s remand order while attempting to clarify the scope of its own 2015 decision, Benko v. Quality Loan Service Corp., which permits plaintiffs to amend their complaint in order to clarify jurisdiction but had created uncertainty in the lower courts.
